Sunday, February 26, 2006

R and I were trying to fall asleep last night while Oliver was babbling and attempting to stand up against her side. He's crawling now and pulling himself to a stand constantly, so this is what he does sometimes. Usually, he runs out of gas, and the manic crawling and standing turn to resting his head on the bed, and suddenly he's dozing away blissfully.

Apparently, both R and I fell asleep before Oliver did. The last thing I remember was him standing up against her leg or her hip, and then I was asleep.

"Oliver? OH MY GOD WHERE IS HE?"

Let me add for non-parents that, once your baby reaches mobility, the most frightening feeling in the world is losing sight of the baby. It means he's gotten into the power cords, or that pile of receipts you meant to shred, or your water glass you left on the floor. Or maybe he's decided to stand up using the rocking chair for support, and he's about to topple over. It almost always means trouble.

I woke up like a shot. Both of us looked instinctly to the foot of the bed. And then down. And there he was, sitting on a pillow, smiling up at both of us with his merry prankster grin.

We have a cosleeper which runs along R's side of the bed. It almost covers the entire side of the bed, but there's a small gap near the foot of the bed. Oliver apparently crawled down to the gap and fell over onto a conveniently-placed pillow. Thank God. TG we had the pillow there. TG the mattress and boxspring sit on the floor. TG he landed safely, and not on his head, and that he didn't decide to climb straight down the foot of the bed and fall onto the unbuffered floor.

And TG that R woke up when she did. He could have concievably crawled around the entire floor of our completely un-childproofed bedroom. The list of horrors is endless: the metal slats on the bottom of his crib, the light bulbs in the closet, cords, cell phones attached to cords, laundry he could choke himself on, magazines from which to chew pages.

We got lucky. I may never forget looking down, my heart pounding, and seeing his smiling delighted face. As far as he was concerned, he just had another little adventure.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

This is the first day of the rest of my blog, I suppose. I've been running a Salon blog since June of 2004. Salon has decided to do some "restructuring" (read: bored with blogs now, thanks for your time, last one out please turn out the lights.) As part of the restructure, the future of the Salon blog community is uncertain. In any event, I need to find another port to call home. Salon's blogs run on a hideous platform called Radio Userland. (When I describe this, you will laugh and wonder if I'm making it all up.)

In order to post to a Radio blog or do anything to it (upload a photo, change the blogroll), you need to run the Radio program, a huge unwieldy piece of software, on your desktop. After five minutes or so, which might as well be accompanied by Tardis-style sound effects, you're up and running. Then, after you write and publish your post, you just have to wait ten minutes while it "floats up to the cloud" (I swear to almighty God that's the official terminology), and voila, you've got an updated blog! Unless Radio hiccups. In which, start over again.

So, as you can imagine, the concept of just opening a page in a browser and writing a post is pretty wild to me.

There were other problems: browser compatibility problems, Radio functionality problems (cloudbursts, as it were). Plus the license fee. Yeah, that's right, kiddos - once upon a time, it made sense to charge people for the ability to run a blog.

So now what's going to happen is that my former blog is going to essentially waste away. Once the license fee comes due, I won't renew it because it doesn't make sense. When the blogs were actively being promoted by Salon, most of the appeal wore off. Sure, we were still technically part of Salon, but the page views we were once virtually guaranteed were gone. So, like Billy Joel said, I'm moving on. Or moving out. Er ... moving.

I'll be cross-posting entries here and on the original Too Much Blue Sky blog for a while. Eventually, once the Salon blogs disappear or my Radio membership terminates, I'll switch here full-time. In the meantime, if you want to get to know me, go to the old blog and look through the history. I'll try to keep this updated on a semi-regular basis. Cheers.